Even underpaid workers’ job satisfaction more than doubled—rocketing from 40% to 82%—when they knew why they were paid what they were and felt free to talk about compensation openly.

In other words, how we perceive what we’re paid matters more than what we’re actually paid.

And the more information we have about why we earn what we do–especially in relation to our coworkers–the happier we are.

While employers might fear that sharing compensation figures could lead to jealousy between employees, researchers found that clear communication about compensation is one of the top predictors of employee satisfaction–more important than things like career advancement opportunities and employer appreciation.

People believe that if information is withheld, it is for good reason. This in turn affects three types of justice judgements: informational (it being withheld); procedural (lack of employee voice and potential bias), and distribution (compressing the pay range).

And when we fill in the blanks of withheld information, we’re very often wrong. The same Payscale study found that two-thirds of people who are likely being compensated fairly believe they are underpaid.

Conversely, a 2011 study at the London School of Economics followed companies that switched from pay secrecy to open compensation and feedback, and noted that more information about pay led to “a large and long-lasting increase in productivity that is costless to the firm.”

There’s another growing factor at play in the rise of transparent salaries: equality.

Tech companies like Pinterest, GoDaddy, and Salesforce have all recently reviewed or announced plans to review overall employee compensation data to root out gender wage gaps or other challenges to equal pay for equal work.

How can we make sure underrepresented groups are paid equally for equal work from the start? Transparency provides the clearest-cut solution we’ve discovered, in that it creates a culture of conversation where teammates feel empowered to share information and ask questions.

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In 2015, the #talkpay movement, started by the programmer Lauren Voswinkel on the diversity-in-tech focused site Model View Culture, provided a boost here.

Voswinkel urged Twitter users to open up and share their salaries with the world. The hashtag would go on to get nearly 12,000 mentions, according to Fortune. About 1,300 people published their salaries, BuzzFeed determined.

Voswinkel told the Guardian, “This type of discrepancy is only allowed to exist in an environment where people are afraid to talk about this pay, and that’s the thing that I want to abolish.”

Most recently, President Obama proposed a new rule that would require companies with more than 100 employees to report salary data by race, gender, and ethnicity.

So if pay transparency has all these benefits, why isn’t everyone doing it?

One big reason is that there’s a cultural stigma in many places in the world attached to talking about money openly.

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In a fascinating blog post, Transferwise asked 50 people around the world if they’d ever be willing to share their salary openly and got a crash course in how different cultures view compensation:

From the Belgians to the Japanese, everyone could concur it’s generally considered rude to ask how much money someone makes. The Brits claimed approaching the subject with a polite, “If you don’t mind me asking” could make it acceptable. The North Americans (mainly New Yorkers and a few Canadians) were more reserved, saying it depended on the nature of the relationship and motives of whoever was asking. The Dutch, Belgians, and French confirmed it went against etiquette and was generally “not done.”

Here’s a cool word cloud of some of the terms that came up in their conversations:

In some regions there are rules and laws against talking about pay—and in many more, there’s a myth that these rules exist, even when they don’t.

Even in the United States, where it is illegal to bar employees from sharing salary information, a 2010 survey found that nearly half of all U.S. workers reported being either contractually forbidden or “strongly discouraged” from discussing pay with their colleagues.

Beyond cultural norms, it’s also not the right personal solution for everyone—particularly those concerned with privacy in an increasingly surveilled society.

The answer for you and your company might be somewhere in the middle. Some action steps might include things like:

Talking about your salary with coworkers (if you’re legally able)

Asking leaders at your company questions about compensation philosophy

Sharing median salaries for roles

Sharing salary ranges for roles

Sharing salaries internally

At Buffer, we’ve been so honored that other companies have chosen to adapt or modify our open salary formula for their needs, and anyone is welcome to build on and make it better for their team.

In addition, we’ve also launched a salary calculator, to make it easier to understand how our formula is calculated based on all its factors.

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For anyone looking to take a job at a startup, working on salaries at a startup, or just curious about salary transparency, we hope our formula and calculator might cut down on the time you spend thinking about salaries by many hours.

What’s your take on salary transparency? Would you ever share what you are paid with others? I’d love to hear all your thoughts in the comments!

This article originally appeared on Buffer and is reprinted with permission.